In
October 2000, members of Teamsters Local 439 organized a
strike against Summit Logistics, which serves as the main
warehouse and distribution center for Safeway supermarkets.
Striking workers sought to remedy a variety of pay and health
and safety issues for drivers and warehouse workers. During
the forty-five day strike, Teamsters picketed the Summit
Logistics warehouse in Tracy, California and passed out
leaflets at Safeway stores. The strike lasted forty-five
days and ended on November 30, 2000. These photographs were
taken on the picket line in Tracy and at various Safeway
stores during the final days of the strike on November 24,
25, and 26, 2000.

The
photographs in this exhibit present the everyday experience
of life on a very specific picket line. These photographs
are not about the heated, intense moments that make headlines
and inspire twenty-second news soundbytes. Rather, they
are about the monotony, the daily grind of life on this
or any picket line. While many photojournalists rush to
capture and many scholars attempt to explain the emotional
moments of a strike -- the violence, the raw conflict --
this collection of photographs depicts the subdued moments
that accompany strikes. It also examines the provisionality
of the picket line; distinctions of private space and notions
of home dissolve as workers turn pickup trucks into bedrooms
and create communal kitchens in rundown RVs. The picket
line explodes in contradiction. The constant flow of replacement
workers references the work that creates abundance or immiseration.
Here plenty and scarcity, public and private, individuality
and communalism, success and failure, coexist. The picket
line is also about repetition. Indeed, these photographs
could have been shot on any three days during the strike;
there is so little to distinguish one day from another.
An endless cycle of cooking, sitting, pacing, watching,
and strategic sign and body placement, characterizes the
forty-five day ordeal.

The
exhibit also includes photographs in which no workers are
present. These images depict traces of the strike: signs,
empty chairs, skid marks. The signs are defiant, filling
the spaces that bodies usually occupy. The image of skid
marks left by untrained and inexperienced replacement workers
suggests a violence that the images of restrained workers
belie. Some images even imply humor, albeit a humor steeped
in irony; a woman dismisses a picketer to answer her cell
phone.

This
exhibit locates itself in the moments that require waiting,
patience, bracing against the cold, surviving on donated
hot dogs cooked in industrial drums, adjusting to a changed
daily routine. It is about a constancy of character and
the commitment that is needed to survive through months
of insecurity, instability and physical discomfort.

Tamara
Kay
October 2001

Tamara Kay received her B.A. in Sociology, and in Art Theory
and Practice with a concentration in Painting, at Northwestern
University in 1993. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in
the Department of Sociology at the University of California,
Berkeley. Her scholarly work examines labor, economic development,
and processes of globalization. Her Ph.D. dissertation focuses
on the effects of globalization and North American economic
integration on transnational labor movement organizing.
For more information about the Teamsters, their strike,
or the exhibit, contact Tamara at: tamarak@uclink.berkeley.edu.